Linda Larsson Kakuli, a researcher with Swedish Television, votes for Excel and Tabula.
In this Lightning Round panel at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference, presenters had just five minutes to describe their favorite data tool. The results: tips ranging from basic Excel to Z-score.
Helena Bengtsson, Editor, Data Projects, The Guardian
Favorite tool: FUNCTIONS in Excel: =IF, =Exact and =Proper.
IF function tests a condition and returns one value if TRUE and another value if FALSE
Exact function compares two strings and returns TRUE if the values are the same FALSE if they are not
Proper function makes the text look pretty, according to Bengtsson.
Check out her presentation here.
Crina Boros, investigator at Greenpeace UK
Favorite tool: Fuzzy lookup Add-In for Excel for precision journalism. It can be used to identify and match textually similar string data in Excel.
Check out her presentation here.
Anuska Delic, journalist in Delo, Slovenia, and project leader of DeloData
Favorite tool: Open Refine used for mass replacing complex data.
Check out her presentation here.
Rob Gebeloff, New York Times, specialist in data analysis
Favorite tool: Z-score (standard score), it standardizes the data so everything is on the same scale
Sylke Gruhnwald, team lead of the data investigation unit at Swiss broadcaster SRF
Favorite tools:
- Trello to distribute tasks
- Giphy.com to disclose information
- Import.io
- Rddj.nfo
- GitHub
Tommy Kaas, data journalist, trainer, co-founder of Kaas & Mulvad.
Favorite tool: VLOOKUP function in Excel
Megan Luther, training director, Investigative Reporters and Editors
Favorite tools:
- Excel
- import.io
- google chrome extentions: scraper
Check out her Presentation here.
Chan Ka Wai, data editor, Caixin (China)
Favorite tool: Word Frequency counting and TF.IDF (term frequency–inverse document frequency)
Check out her Presentation here.
Linda Larsson Kakuli, researcher, Swedish Television.
Favorite tools: Excel spreadsheets and Tabula, a free tool used for extracting data from PDFs.
Check out her Presentation here.
The authors are journalism students at the University College of Volda who are on special assignment covering #gijc15.
